Demography and Cultural Innovation: a Model and its Implications for the Emergence of Modern Human Culture

By S. Shennan. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2001

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f161039f5bbbb6f56a9774b5cdf11b7a739aa34

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Citations in the corpus

Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification (2008, background): “One possible explanation for this correlation is that larger, more densely connected populations are likely to produce faster cultural evolutionary rates for sophisticated technology, complex skills, and knowledge (Henrich 2004b; Shennan 2001).”
Human dispersal across diverse environments of Asia during the Upper Pleistocene (2013, background): “What this means for Out of Africa models is that cognitive modernity may have emerged simultaneously or even before (Kingdon, 1993; Foley and Lahr, 1997) morphological modernity, and the appearance of traditional indicators of behavioural modernity in the archaeological recordmaymark demographic or ”
Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, methodology): “Shennan (2001) and Powell et al. (2009) applied similar models directly to archaeological data regarding Palaeolithic Europe, showing that the appearance and disappearance of complex technological and social traits such as abstract art, the bow and musical instruments all coincide with changes in…”
The Social Brain and the Shape of the Palaeolithic (2011, background): “…size, and assuming demography determines the maintenance of cultural complexity, Powell et al. (2009) argue that the different timings of the human revolution are explained by the moment that the size of any one regional population passed a critical threshold (Brumm & Moore 2005; Shennan 2001).”
The burden of proof for a cultural group selection account (2014, background): “14 The complexity of technology that a group can maintain is a function of its size (Henrich, 2004; Shennan, 2001).”
A demographic model for Palaeolithic technological evolution: The case of East Asia and the Movius Line (2010, methodology): “Following Shennan (2001), Hosfield (2005) contends that this represents an incidence of successful technological innovation and transmission (i.e. adoption) facilitated by increased population levels.”
An experimental demonstration of the effect of group size on cultural accumulation (2014, background): “Thus, the results of the experiment support the proposed link between population size and cultural accumulation put forward by Shennan (2001), Henrich (2004), Powell et al. (2009) and others.”
Craniofacial Feminization, Social Tolerance, and the Origins of Behavioral Modernity (2014, background): “…Klein 2005; Stiner et al. 1999), produced population densities sufficient for a high rate of CTE, and thus demographic factors, rather than cognitive capabilities, might account for the persistent expression of behavioral modernity in the LSA and UP (Powell, Shennan, and Thomas 2009; Shennan 2001).”
Dual-inheritance theory: The evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution (2007, methodology): “among populations (Shennan, 2001; Henrich, 2004) and how might this have influenced the”
Modeling Human Ecodynamics and Biocultural Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia (2011, background): “” Important to understanding the dynamics of Upper Pleistocene human ecology is a broad and rapidly growing consensus that a large portion of human behavior is the phenotypic expression of a cumulative body of information transmitted between individuals by social learning rather than genes— often gl”
Recognizing Complex Cognition through Innovative Technology in Stone Age and Palaeolithic Sites (2013, background): “Shennan (2001) and Powell and colleagues (2009) find that there is a positive correlation between elevated levels of innovation and demography, rather than with cognition.”
Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “…learning (Sterelny 2011), including demographic shifts toward higher population densities enabling greater accumulation of cultural information (Shennan 2001, Powell et al. 2009, Derex et al. 2013), the emergence of exchange-based economies (Sterelny 2014), increased intergroup conflict or…”